Already there is a new trend, according to the latest Deutschlandtrend survey conducted for German broadcaster ARD. Pollster infratest dimap surveyed a representative sample of 1,334 eligible German voters from March 31 to April 2. The CDU/CSU slumped to 26%, their lowest level since October 2022, while the AfD reached a new high of 24%.
Seven out of ten respondents in the ARD Deutschlandtrend survey would like to see higher import tariffs on US products in retaliation
What is up, Germany? The far right??
I can’t point fingers as an American, but like…Germany was so proud of having pushed out far-right extremism.
Part of it is the US turning far right. Everyone here uses american apps and social media. When those platforms turn far right, so do more people around the world. China’s TikTok is doing the exact same. We need domestic services quick or the entire world will turn into a fascist hellhole.
I know a lot of the Nazis took inspiration from eugenics movements in the US, so I am sad to see that the same migration of ideas is still happening today.
Morbid curiosity has me wondering what will happen if the entire world turns fascist, rather than just a couple of countries who get targeted by antifascist militaries from the rest of the world.
You can’t push out something your socioeconomic system creates.
Also American… It is disheartening to see others so quickly follow the mistakes they clearly see us make.
Just like most of the Mango Mussolini supporters here state side, I wonder how many are actually on board with the xenophobia, and how many are “Der Herde blind folgen”.
Xenophobia is pretty much a human constant, though. That’s why it’s so easy to exploit.
I don’t think xenophobia is even the root cause. There are studies on extremism that reach back decades that show a consistent racist potential of the German population at about 10%. Personally I’m convinced that most of the percentage on top of that for the AfD is people that feel abandoned or even betrayed by our political system. And looking at how the distribution of wealth and income has developed since the 90s, they’re not wrong to feel that way. People voting the extreme right are mostly those left behind in these statistics.
And up until this point, every party except the democratic far left has completely ignored this or resorted to victim blaming, telling the poor to just work harder. So these people vote the only party that tells them they will burn the whole system down. Let’s see if the ruling parties use their last bullet to remedy this.
From what’s I understand about the political landscape in the US, the situation is not too different there.
Yeah, a lot of the problems that the AfD talk about are real (when they aren’t making up numbers about immigrants). It just sucks that the voters are flocking to the xenophobes instead of parties that at least try to improve things, and I think the latent xenophobia in a large part of the population (way more than 10%, though they’re not necessarily all as extreme as those 10%) is a big reason why. And propaganda, of course.
And the Sadest thing is. That like Trump the AFD wants more money for the rich and less for the poor. And most Voters are poor and dont’t understand what they will do if they have the power.
It was a facade.
In the 90s after Germany became one big Germany again other European countries felt threatened. So Germany created the image of “memory culture” to claim it has adorned for its past and is not a threat anymore. However this was only superficial. At the same time there were the “baseball-bat years” in which skinhead Neonazis roamed especially in eastern Germany and beat up, lynched and sometimes murdered foreigners and leftists.
Fast forward to today. The mantra of “never again” as a result of the German history is only applied to a tokenized idea of Jewish life in the form of the state of Israel, rather than to apply it to all humans universally. So now that the token Israel is the source of grave crimes against humanity, instead of focusing on defending values, the token is defended. And anyone who is in the way of that token faces repressions, cynically targeting dissenting Jews in academia and culture disproportionately more than they are part of German society as a whole or part of academia and culture itself.
Finally the “memory culture” is perverted into abolishing German responsibility for Antisemitism and Racism and expanding Racism again Muslim people, or people perceived as Muslims based on their skin color. It is perverted into shifting the blame and created means of repression that will greatly help the fascists to establish their rule once again.
Germany has never pushed out far-right extremism. It put it onto a low burner, but it is deeply rooted in the German society and is blossoming again now, last but not least because people who proclaim to be progressive, such as the Greens and Social Democrats have deep seated right and reactionary convictions they now feel comfortable to show as the notion of “far”-right has been pushed further by the AfD fascists.